Save Ink and Paper with Print Friendly for Chrome

When it comes to printing out websites you often end with an output that is displaying more than what you actually needed in terms of information. You may see advertisement, menus, widgets and other elements in the printout that you really could care less about. More pressing than that however is the fact that you spend more ink and paper printing out the website than you really should have.

If you want to save ink or paper, you could obviously try and only print out a selection of the page. This sometimes works well enough, while not at all at other times, especially on sites where other elements are included in the article that you want to print out.

A better solution are browser extensions or scripts that help you modify the page so that only the information that you need are printed out in the end.

We have covered quite a few different extensions and scripts for that purpose in the past. Print Friendly back in 2009 for instance allowed you to do that in the Firefox browser. And it is that extension that is now also available for the Google Chrome Internet browser.

The Print Friendly and PDF extension adds a single icon to Chrome's address bar that you can click on to create an optimized version of the active web page for print outs. The optimized version is displayed in an overlay with a toolbar displayed at the top.

When you hover your mouse over an element on the page, you will notice that you can delete individual items with a single-click. This can be useful for leftover items like images or other elements that you are not interested in. If you are not interested in images, you can simply activate the remove image box to remove all images from the article.

You can also modify the font size, for instance to pack more text on a single sheet of paper, or increase the text font size for better readability.

Once you are satisfied with your selection, you can click on the print button to print out what you see on the screen. It is alternatively possible to save the contents as a pdf document, or send it to an email recipient.

All in all a great extension for Chrome users who want more control over their website printout.

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About Martin Brinkmann

Martin Brinkmann is a journalist from Germany who founded Ghacks Technology News Back in 2005. He is passionate about all things tech and knows the Internet and computers like the back of his hand.You can follow Martin on Facebook, Twitter or Google+

About gHacks

Ghacks is a technology news blog that was founded in 2005 by Martin Brinkmann. It has since then become one of the most popular tech news sites on the Internet with five authors and regular contributions from freelance writers.